Not to get anyone's hopes too high, but as of this writing, Donald Trump is not the President of the United States. It's even too soon to refer to him as "president-elect." The 538 Electors have not officially cast their votes yet.
When the Electoral College does meet in December, what do you think are the odds of enough of the Republican electors cast a "faithless" vote for Hillary Clinton? Will the Electoral College, which many of my Green comrades and I favor abolishing, actually save the US from a Trump presidency? Apart from that Supreme nastiness in 2000, Trump is about to become the first president-elect to be the defendant in a civil trial between the election and the inauguration. The case relates to allegations of fraud at Trump University. That does not mean that Judge Gonzalo "The Mexican" Curiel will find Trump liable, but the evidence is pretty clear. The trial alone will cast a cloud over Trump and his character. As of now, Michigan's 16 EV's are not officially in Trump's bag. If he does win Michigan, and Clinton wins New Hampshire (as expected), that gives Trump/Pence 306 to Clinton/Kaine's 232. So 37 Republican electors would have to switch in order to tie the score and send it to Congress, 38 for Clinton to win outright. Bear in mind, I don't relish the thought of a Clinton presidency either, for reasons I have enumerated previously. As Cornel West has put it, Clinton is a "neoliberal disaster," and Trump is a "neofascist catastrophe." For what it's worth, Clinton would most likely continue the US imperialist war on poor brown people. She would not be the international embarrassment that Trump would, combining as he does the worst traits of Berlusconi, Ahmedinejad, Putin (no link necessary), and Filipino enfant terrible Rodrigo Duterte. First, major congratulations to the state of Maine, which narrowly approved a ballot measure to bring Ranked Choice Voting to state and local elections. According to unofficial results, Maine said Yes to six different questions, including legalizing and taxing sales of cannabis for recreational use. Three of those Yesses were even narrower than the RCV question.
In case you missed Part I of this series, the Texas results, here it is. Click the Read More link to see results for Green candidates in selected federal and state races. I make no guarantee as to their complete accuracy or officiality. This information takes a while to extract and process, so I'll post an incomplete list and add information periodically through the day. As you might expect, large percentages indicate that one of the major parties did not field a candidate for that race. Sources: mostly secretaries of state, plus some newspapers like the Hartford Courant and Chicago Tribune. UPDATE: See the Green Party's Election Night Results page for additional information, including some county and municipal races that I did not track, as well as Green Party members running for non-partisan offices. Special congratulations to Martina Salinas for utterly smashing her 2014 record for a Texas Green candidate in a four-way race. The other statewide candidates rode her coattails and also broke the 2% mark.
No Greens received the necessary 5% to secure ballot access for 2018. Salinas's Libertarian opponent Mark Miller did reach 5.27%, so the Libs will not have to petition for a ballot line that year. Sources: The Secretary of State's Office, and the County Clerk websites for Bexar, Dallas, and Travis Counties. All races below are four-way unless otherwise noted. Vote counts may not be final. Statewide candidates' names appear in italics. Percentages are in bold, like the Texans who dared to Vote Green this year. Except that I'm an embittered old American lefty, not a cute British novelty pop star. And if I had a hundred hands, I'd be shooting the bird with all of them and looking around to borrow more.
And there are plenty of fuck-yous to go around. My own allies in the radical and progressive movements would not escape the birdshot. Before beginning the rant, allow me to link you to some other progressive analyses of the turd sandwich that was 8 November 2016: Brains and Eggs, Socratic Gadfly, and Thomas Frank's piece in Comment Is Free. There's also this surprisingly chill post from Caity Johnstone at Inquisitr, which makes me wonder what she smoked or drank to get in that frame of mind. Democrats, Clintonites, and Berners who fell into line: Before you starting unfriending all those third-party voters with splinters in their eyes, you'd better see a doctor about that plank in your own. ***** It's late afternoon, and through the work day, I've managed to slough off some of the bitterness that I felt this morning. But still...two middle fingers way up. Mostly, I'm a tad bitter because I have so many friends who vote Blue, many of whom will continue to froth for years about how third parties fucked up this election just like in 2000. You First, Progs Let's begin with my progressive peeps. There's some good news/bad news in Texas: Green candidates for statewide offices set new records for vote total and percentage, but didn't get to the magical 5%. Stein/Baraka ended up with 1.0% of the popular vote nationwide, 0.9% in Texas. The national tally of 1.2 million votes is a marked improvement over 469,000 in 2012. Thank those of you who defied the duopoly. As a longtime Greenie, I know how support for third parties usually disappears, but come on! Last-minute polls were showing the Green ticket near 2%. In August and September, it was closer to 4%. Does that drop-off represent a few million of you who chickened out? Were poll respondents lying? Were the polls themselves bogus? Trump and Clinton voters came out of the woodwork? Maybe a combination of all that? I can understand going voting-booth-chickenshit in a swing state. It looks like a fair number of voters in safe states like Texas (I got that one right: Texas ain't a-swingin'), there's no excuse. ...and the Flying Fickle Finger Goes to...
The 2016 Grand Prize for Advanced Electoral Fuckery The Democratic Party wins this trophy in a landslide. No, #NotAllDemocrats, but the establishment, the machinery, the billionaires and the local Dem apparatchiks who greased the skids for Clinton. PDiddie & Gadfly already said nearly everything I might say about the Democratic fumble—itself an echo of 2000—along with pull-quotes from Thomas Frank. But I can add this: As I have stated emphatically and repeatedly, five million Americans who voted went Libertarian or Green did so for actual reasons, not just for hipster-cred. We are voting against the Evil Transnational Corporate Empire that keeps both major parties major and keeps the bombs falling on Pakistani weddings. When it's appropriate, or when avenues of civil protest are closed to us, we do more than vote: We take our politics to the street and throw ourselves on the gears of the machine. Apart from the 80 million registered voters who did not vote at all, we five million said "You don't own our vote" in a way that actually means something. Nearly 66 million people voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Fewer than 60 million voted for Hillary Clinton yesterday. A portion of those 6 million missing votes went toward Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, but many more went to Donald Trump. (I'll link to the source when I can find it again.) If this election was a referendum on how well our Democratic president has guided the ship of state, fancy MSNBC graphs & statistics be damned, a lot of the white, working-class Democratic base just gave the Dems a big heave-ho. These people perceive, rightly or not, that the Democratic establishment has given up on them, so they have now given up on the Democratic Party. The only progressive alternative left for them was the Jewish doctor and the black philosopher running with the party that never wins. Of course, the Democratic Party cannot just dump its billionaire benefactors, from whom it gets its life-blood campaign funding, right? Well, it could take a cue from Senator Bernard Sanders, start appealing to regular working stiffs, and become once again the Party of the People. Now that the voting is over, Democrats, show me what democracy looks like. Organize like a motherfucker. Assuming some Republican Electors don't flip their votes between now and 19 December and change the outcome, the time to defeat Trump is not in 2020, and it's not just by voting. Do unto the Donald as the Republicans have done unto you, and start defeating him now. Yes, I'm deliberately looking away from the increasingly tense coverage of the presidential race on MSNBC. I have never seen Rachel Maddow so close to utter incomprehension. Despite her PhD, despite her knowing the whole panoply of explanations of how her girl Hillary is not wiping the floor with Orange Mussolini, she can't believe that so much of America can be hoodwinked into voting for him. After all, 98% of America's major newspaper editorial boards can't be wrong...right?
Libertarian Railroad Commissioner nominee Mark Miller picked up several endorsements from Texas newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle. Miller is well on his way to grabbing the Holy Grail for minor-party candidates in Texas: 5% of the vote in a race with both major parties running. If his current figure of 5.22% holds, he will guarantee access to the Texas ballot for the Libertarian Party in 2018. Wayne Christian will keep that seat in Republican hands, handily fending off challenges from Miller, Green nominee Martina Salinas, and Democrat Grady Yarbrough. Republicans are winning all the statewide races in Texas by the usual margins: about 14 percentage points, although Trump's lead in the state is less than 10. Nonetheless, Miller's showing is a victory of sorts for minor parties in general. If the Libertarians can do it, then so can the Greens. Salinas herself is up over 3% in that same race, improving over her 2% finish in 2014. With about half the votes counted, all six ballot questions in Maine are passing, mostly by narrow margins:
Ranked Choice Voting in state & local elections: 52.5% (hot damn!) Legalize recreational ganja: 50.7% Increase the state's minimum wage to $12 by 2020: 55.2% Expand gun background checks: 52.2% (that's the big surprise) Tax incomes over $200,000 at about 3% for public education: 50.6% $100 million in bonds for transportation projects: 60.5% I hope that the nation takes notice of Ranked Choice Voting in particular, as I noted here. If that measure passes, that whole states as laboratories of democracy cliché will be brought to light. We will see how it changes the nature of elections there. It will not affect the presidential race there at first, but it may eventually be expanded to include the top of the ticket. Anybody here old enough to remember when people said, "No state will ever legalize marijuana or same-sex marriage"? The comments section is open and awaiting your best Maine puns. Greens running for the State House have varying levels of success as of this writing, with about 7 million votes counted statewide. As one might expect, percentages earned vary with which parties are contesting the respective races.
Among the leaders, katija gruene of Greater Austin, running in District 51 against only an incumbent Democrat, has 11.56%. Joe McElligott has about 5.5% in a race with a Republican incumbent in District 127 (Humble-Kingwood); Libertarian candidate Scott Ford has about double that. The Greens' lone State Senate candidate, Scott Pusich in District 26 (Northwest San Antonio), has 6.32%. There is no Republican running against Democratic incumbent José Menendez. In that race, the Libertarian candidate, Fidel "Two Bears" Castillo, also has about double the Green tally. From the Texas Secretary of State's Office, with mostly early votes counted (about 40% of registered voters):
It's only a partial result, but here in Harris County, Green candidates in statewide, Congressional, and two State House races are making respectable showings (as these things go). Some of these figures for statewide candidates may even portend how they do across the state; indeed, some of doing better in Harris County than statewide, some not as well, but in only a few races are the differences significant.
Nearly all of these figures have increased over the early voting totals that I reported earlier, and that post has now been replaced by this one. Statewide candidates are indicated in italics, because they are special: If any one of them receives 5% of the vote, the Green Party receives automatic ballot access for 2018.
Congressional Districts 2, 18, and 29 are completely within Harris County, as are State Districts 126 through 150 (except 136 which was moved to Williamson County after the 2010 census). MSNBC, true to form, called several states for Clinton or Trump as soon as those states' polls closed at 8 pm CST. And why wouldn't they? It's not as if any reputable poll said anything different. CNN has been doing the same.
Neither network bothers to mention Jill Stein, and both give only passing mention to Gary Johnson. Both networks are devoting about 90% of their coverage to the presidential race; Congressional races barely rate, although MSNBC called the Illinois Senatorial race for Tammy Duckworth before a single vote had been counted. Various websites are showing some returns that include Stein, including of course the various states' election pages. I haven't yet dug into down-ticket races with Green Party candidates, but there aren't yet enough of them to report anything. In other words, BREAKING NEWS! We don't really know anything new yet, except that Florida is neck & neck. So stay, as they say, tuned. |
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